Telenor

Telenor Improves Sales Performance and Outcomes with Business iQ and Real-Time Alerts

Key Benefits

Mission-critical visibility allows Telenor to proactively make changes before issues become problems

AppDynamics powers the QA process, allowing Telenor to fix issues before changes go into production

Business iQ enables Telenor to see how user experiences are affecting sales — per location or service

Challenge: Telenor needed to fully understand the end user experience and proactively identify when its customer-facing applications performed poorly.

In 2016, telecommunications provider Telenor upgraded its IT platform and business support stack on the back end as well as its website front end to provide customers and sales agents with self-service support and user account information. After the integration of front and back ends was complete, sales agents at Telenor’s point-of-sale locations noticed slow performance of the company’s web-based One Screen application, which they rely on to see customer account information and drive sales. One Screen also provides customers with self-service account information via the Telenor website.

“With AppDynamics, we are able to see and experience the same thing as agents in our retail shops and customers on our website. It’s mission critical for us to have this visibility into the user experience.”

Torben Frølund, Senior Manager of Offshore Development, Telenor

Torben Frølund, Telenor Senior Manager of Offshore Development, is responsible for One Screen from a DevOps perspective. He wanted to understand what customers and sales agents were seeing and gauge how long people were waiting for pages to load so improvements could be made. He found just what Telenor needed with AppDynamics Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and End User Monitoring (EUM) solution.

“With AppDynamics, we’re able to see and experience the same thing as agents in our retail shops and customers on our website,” said Frølund. “It’s mission critical for us to have this visibility into the user experience.”

About Telenor

Telenor ASA is a Norwegian multinational telecommunications company headquartered at Fornebu in Bærum, close to Oslo. It is one of the world's largest mobile telecommunications companies with operations worldwide, focusing on Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and Asia.

Solution: AppDynamics tracks every transaction and alerts Telenor so they can fix issues before they become problems.

AppDynamics APM automatically discovers, maps, and visualizes Telenor’s customer journeys through each application service and infrastructure dependency, delivering a single source of end-to-end performance truth about the customer experience, rather than monitoring individual services.

“We have weekly product releases and without AppDynamics flagging issues in development, it would be days before somebody would actually notice if there was a problem and report it back,” said Frølund. “With AppDynamics, we have a quality assurance process that fixes most issues before going into production, and with the main dashboard, I can immediately see if something is wrong after a release and fix it right away.”

AppDynamics EUM optimizes the user experience by tracking every business transaction and providing deep code-level visibility into web and mobile apps. AppDynamics captures errors, crashes, network requests, and page load details, and alerts Telenor automatically on issues as they develop so they can respond quickly before they affect customer satisfaction.

“I started seeing tremendous value in AppDynamics when I realized we were able to see the real user experience, how many errors customers were seeing, and the response time,” said Frølund. “From there, we can dig deeper into business transactions to see exactly which processes are experiencing more errors, and as a result of this visibility, proactively make changes to those processes to avoid potential issues.”

“Customers won’t necessarily tell us when they are having problems making a purchase, they’re just going to go away. AppDynamics keeps us on top of those experiences and enables us to react immediately to issues so users don’t have poor experiences.”

Torben Frølund, Senior Manager of Offshore Development, Telenor

AppDynamics Business iQ takes this monitoring a step further by connecting application performance to business outcomes and providing automated and actionable health baselines, anomaly detection, and alerts so Telenor can proactively manage risk and opportunity.

“Business iQ allows us to slice the data AppDynamics collects in different ways,” said Frølund. “We have 60 retail shops in Denmark selling our products and some were complaining about the performance of our One Screen app while others were ok. We didn’t know why there was such a difference in performance amongst all of them. Using the data and analytics from Business iQ, we were able to see the user experience — per shop — and identify where things were going wrong, like WiFi interference or poor Internet connectivity. This enabled us to start fixing the issues and will have a positive impact on our business. Similarly, with AppDynamics Business iQ, if we see sales going down in a particular location or on a specific service, we know something is wrong so we can make changes right away.”

Telenor relies on the comprehensive visibility provided by AppDynamics to avoid problems that affect revenue. “Customers won’t necessarily tell us when they are having problems making a purchase, they’re just going to go away,” said Frølund. “As we add more services to our website, that means fewer customers interacting with agents, so if they’re unhappy with their experience, they’re probably not going to tell us. They'll just choose another vendor. AppDynamics keeps us on top of those experiences and enables us to react immediately to issues so users don’t have poor experiences.”

As Telenor becomes more and more digitally based, the importance of the visibility provided by AppDynamics continues to grow. Consequently, there has been a strong focus and concerted effort placed on increasing AppDynamics adoption and spreading its usage to non-technical users on Telenor’s Digital teams. As an example of measures to improve adoption, Telenor in early 2019 migrated AppDynamics from on-premise to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and appreciates both the ease of use and stickiness benefits.

“It used to require a lot of resources when AppDynamics was on-premise and it was not very easy,” said Frølund. “With the AppDynamics SaaS solution, when there are updates, we get an email telling us what changes will be made automatically. The value of AppDynamics has also become obvious to more people so we went from three users to more than 20, and it’s growing all the time. Finally, I greatly appreciate the support we get from the AppDynamics team to ensure platform health and drive user adoption - the relationship has turned into a great partnership between Telenor and AppDynamics, with fantastic collaboration from both business and technical stakeholders.”